Following the first AI translation demo of Walther’s Von Dem Namen Lutheraner, this second project applies the same workflow to a previously untranslated 1854 article from Der Lutheraner: “Sollen die Apokryphen des Alten Testaments ferner den Bibeln beigebunden werden oder nicht?”

The article presents the classic confessional Lutheran position on the Apocrypha — Luther’s decisive middle way between Rome’s over-canonization and the British Bible societies’ total exclusion. Written by an anonymous author (“R.”) and published in St. Louis in January 1854, it has not previously appeared in English.

Having published both the original text and a hand-revised translation of C.F.W. Walther’s Von Dem Namen Lutheraner (1844), the next step was to put current AI models to work on the same material — not to replace the translation, but to document the workflow and evaluate what productivity gains are actually achievable.

I worked with Claude and Grok to generate a fresh translation of the article from scratch, then documented the methodology throughout. The results were impressive. Work that would traditionally require days of careful effort was completed in a matter of hours.

I have added a translation of C.F.W. Walther’s Von Dem Namen ‘Lutheraner’, originally published in Der Lutheraner in 1844. This rendering was completed in 1989 and revised in 2019. A PDF is now available on the site.

This translation serves a dual purpose. It stands on its own as a historical document worth having in English. It will also serve as a baseline for comparison with AI-generated translations — part of a broader project exploring how AI tools can reduce the effort required to produce quality translations by a factor of ten or more.

This article derives from my 2003 PhD dissertation and extends the earlier essay “Away with the Atheists.” It presents a demographic analysis of Christianity as a minority movement within first-century Jewish and Roman contexts.

Jewish Population in the Empire, 1–300 C.E.

By the opening century, Judaism had dispersed throughout Roman territories. Population estimation for antiquity is notoriously imprecise, but Feldman’s scholarly review puts the Jewish population at approximately 1 million in Israel itself, with 4–8 million throughout the broader empire during the mid-first century. Against an estimated 25–50 million total imperial population, Jews comprised roughly 5–10% of Roman inhabitants — a surprisingly substantial proportion.

This paper was written nearly a decade ago but remained unpublished. It extends earlier research on early Christian linguistic creativity — specifically how the first Jewish Christians employed Old Testament proof texts and thematic references as shorthand testimonia.

The term acheiropoietos — “made without hands” — did not exist before Christianity. The concept derives from Old Testament contrasts between human fabrications and God’s works: dismissing idols as worthless, contrasting God’s heavenly temple with human-built structures, expressing a power that transcends all creation.

After years away from regular writing and scholarly work, this is a return to intellectual production — a warm-up exercise following an extended hiatus. Writing, like software implementation, involves refinement of understanding as much as description of solutions.

This essay is a somewhat wide-ranging survey of language and history from the pre-Christendom period, examining several interconnected threads:

• Rhetorical and linguistic elements in early Christianity’s development
• Early Christian creeds and the history of testimonia
• Roman society from the first through third centuries as context for early Christianity
• Early Jewish Christianity

The essay contains what I hope are some interesting observations that may receive more focused treatment in subsequent posts. It draws on my 2003 PhD dissertation and reflects ongoing interest in how language — the coining of terms, the reuse of Old Testament rhetoric, the adaptation of pagan categories — was itself a theological act in early Christianity.

After a period of geographic relocations and life changes, this site is back — now focused on the distribution of published and unpublished work, both academic and of personal interest.

The plan is to use this as an archive and publication venue for essays, papers, and translations on the history of Christianity, early Christian language and rhetoric, and related topics. More to come.

See this post regarding the experiment that led to this translation: AI Translation Demo – “About The Name Lutheran”

The translation is captured in .pdf format here: About_The_Name_Lutheran_Nispel2026

The translation text is reproduced here:

ON THE NAME “LUTHERAN” C.F.W. Walther

Der Lutheraner, Volume 1, Nos. 1–4 (1 September – 13 October 1844)

Brand-new Grok 2026 Translation from Raw 1844 German OCR With endnotes at ambiguous or difficult passages, expanded glossary, your original translator’s notes, and fresh historical context.

AI Technology, Society, Application to Lutheran and Late Antiquity Scholarship

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is all the current rage. It is a large subject from its technical aspects to the many applications it is finding. It is already disrupting many big tech companies and their expensive software engineering staffs. But it is likely to disrupt many other industries and companies over the coming years.

Having myself applied this tool in my work place, it is amazing in the way it can change a technical workflow and for some tasks 10x improvement in productivity is no lie. Watching the better AI models build, deploy, test, debug, and do it again in a cycle by itself until it reaches a solution and accomplish something in 10 minutes it would have taken you hours to do, is remarkable. And it is probably SW engineers who see and feel this most intensely right now as it is their jobs which are directly in the line of site.

What better way to explain AI than to have AI explain itself?

**** Summary from Grok - 2026**

EDITED BY (@ai_lutheran)

Here is a high-level summary which draws on current research (March 2026) for clear, accessible explanations and vendor insights—ideal for @ai_lutheran or mdnispel.work projects focused on AI research, multilingual summaries/translations, and research on the formation and degradation of western civilization.

Understanding Artificial Intelligence: Key Definitions and Top Players in 2026